thanks matt and david.
ithica 27o9 listed, but scotland's shame was played in its place.

the grand ballroom
support from fuck buttons

reviews/comments

from matt brand:

probably the best show i've been to in my existence, if not then at least in the top 3. the songs played off the new album seemed to be kept to a near-minimum, sound levels were a bit off, piano had to keep being turned up by the sound board, but nothing sounded bad at all. stuart kept smiling his big grin, and a day later i still find my ears pleasurably deafened. they played hit after hit, consisting of a well balanced equation of heavy and quiet songs. i later told a friend it was like having break-up sex, or receiving the greatest fellatio of your life after your father's funeral. only downside was lack of an encore, i would've bought the men a round of pints if they had just come back and closed with stop coming to my house.

a mate said he didn't remember them playing ithica and i agreed, thought forget what they played in it's spot.

from kirk snyder:

it was a great mogwai show last night here in san francisco. they did more with lighting than any of the previous times i've seen them, with some way intense white light bits. the new songs they played were all very good especially jim morrison, after which stuart said "that's the first song on our new record. it's called i'm jim morrison i'm dead. it'll be available at...target". ha. batcat was great, a much bigger and heavier sound than the studio recording.

i'm quite sure that they didn't play ithica 27-9. helicon was tremendous, a particularly noisy version where the underlying chord changes were a bit obscured by the 3 guitar noise blanket on top! but the chords and melody did peek through the noise just enough. great performance of friend of the night (which isn't usually a favorite of mine but last night they killed it!) and cody was fucking breathtaking.

mogwai fear satan was a brilliant performance. stuart played a fender stratocaster on one of the new songs which i've never seen him do before and barry played some new guitars as well: a telecaster and some other weird one which i can't identify that looked a bit like a telecaster but wasn't. john had a beard.

from david mobley:

i think the venue had a curfew, the staff people were very prompt after the lights came on to shove us out of the building so that sort of explains the lack of an encore. (but at 1h45m you can't complain right?)

from dan purtill:

there was no encore. everyone was waaayy too destroyed from batcat. long ass setlist. damn good too.
met the fuck buttons anyways. they were nice.

photos

http://www.flickr.com/photos/khphotos/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/carnivillain/

mogwai's us tour diary

from mogwai.co.uk:

next day, is show-day in san fran. this is a day i won’t forget for two reasons. reason 1: simon our tour manager drags us off to a government building so we can pick up us social security cards meaning we don’t have to pay a load of tax to the us government. however, there was no mention that a social security office in america is a terrible, depressing and possibly violence prone place to be and furthermore, no mention that a san francisco social security office is about the most mental place you can visit outside of basra. the place smelled of immensely potent urine (not good with hangover) and nearly everybody looked like extras from the thriller video. i saw a woman who looked like flava flav’s mum. 2 ghastly hours later and the whole shitnami is over and we receive an email from craig at rock action records with a link to the sun newspaper which is reason 2: they are running a story related to this very tour diary where we joked that we’d release rangers player’s addresses if batcat doesn’t go top 10. apparently rangers football club are “actively investigating” the matter. this perhaps explains why we’ve noticed dodgy looking folk in our audiences attending the last few shows wearing bowler hats, dignified brown brogues and orange sashes. they didn’t look like mogwai fans to us and we’ve just found a hidden camera in the mogwai portable tour chapel, which we feel may be the property of a certain humourless football club in glasgow.

the show was really quite good in san francisco apart from the usual idiots who are afraid to keep their mouth shut for 10 seconds in case they start having an introspective tour of duty into their own minds and then nervous breakdown. i wonder at what point in our career they might realise that we’re playing a concert, with musical instruments, concentrating quite hard, trying to play well and that we don’t much have anything to say to, “woooooo hoooooo i’m alive!” or whatever ultimately pointless b.s. they excrete from their idiotic mouths. but anyway, we met some nice folks in san francisco tonight but i think i’m glad i don’t live here because of the omnipresent aforementioned human urine scent.